Iowa’s Bob Vander Plaats is obsessed with homosexuals, homosexuality, and gay marriage. He is a one-issue candidate whose hatred has a uniqueness of its own but one which is common among evangelical extremists, the KKK and the American Nazi Party. One his personal friends, and a political advisor to the man who aspired to be Governor of the State of Iowa, wrote in the Des Moines Register:

As a friend and former adviser on three of Bob Vander Plaats’ campaigns, I understood from Bob that he was done with campaigning against the courts after the retention vote Nov. 2. Yet his senseless attacks on the courts continue.

Bob is obsessed with the gay-marriage issue. He is so obsessed that he would rather see the Iowa judicial system destroyed, instead of pursuing a change in the law within the channels provided (a constitutional amendment). Iowa’s judicial system has been held in high regard by the entire United States. The Iowa judicial branch has a long history of exceptional service, distinguished and acclaimed decisions – and now it is being raked through the mud, disparaged, criticized and harangued daily.

I would like to ask all Iowans to step back and consider the gravity of what is now being proposed by Bob and other anti-court persons. They are suggesting that the four remaining Supreme Court justices be impeached. No justice in the state of Iowa has ever been impeached. Only 13 federal judges have been impeached in the history of the nation, and the impeachment proceedings were all based upon the commission of criminal acts.

The Iowa Supreme Court justices who wrote a unanimous opinion in Varnum committed no crime. To be impeached, a person must have committed a crime or engaged in malfeasance. When a justice works hard, researches the law, has legal assistants and law clerks research the law and issues a politically unpopular decision in one case, how can that possibly constitute “malfeasance”?

…. Bob Vander Plaats, who is highly regarded by many conservatives in Iowa, is quite simply wrong to encourage Iowans to support the resignation or impeachment of the remaining four justices of the Iowa Supreme Court. He is grasping at political relevance using daily sound bites of misinformation to intentionally mislead.

Like former Arkansas Governor and Baptist Pastor Mike Huckabee, Vander Plaats is quick to quote the Bible–with no knowledge of what it says. Instead, Vander Plaats and Huckabee, like Representatives King of NY and IA, misread it deliberately, transmogrifying ancient tales taken from older cultures, into vendettas against those who disagree with them.

The most common misinterpretation, mistranslation, and transmogrification concerns Genesis 19: the story of the City of Sodom, City of Gomorrah, and City of Zoar (the Cities of the Plain). While Vander Plaats and native-grown theological terrorists and evangelical extremists quote the King James Version (KJV) about how “angels” came to Sodom, they ignore basic facts. One: that the Cities of the Plain were at war, and that those who would seek shelter and refuge in their cities had to register with city officials. Two: that the “angels” were men (the word means “messenger” and indicates an envoy from another political entity or power) who crept into the city without registering–which was a crime (as it is in the USA for an illegal alien to cross the border without permission). Three: when it became known that the agents were secreted in Lot’s home, the entire city council–the men and the women “young and old” (Genesis 19:4)–came to Lot’s house and demanded to see and register the agents. But when the townspeople demanded to see the agents, Lot committed a greater crime prohibited in the same text: verse 8 says he offered his two daughters to the people “to do with as you wish” (implying, rape, sodomy, murder, and so forth). Far from being against sex, Lot not only had sex with his two young daughters, but made both pregnant (Genesis 19:34-37). But this was common practice in those days, for even the “man” Abraham sold his wife Sarah three times to men for cattle and other forms of wealth.

In the original scrolls there is no crime of homosexuality–and no sin–as the word and concept did not even exist save for the few “select priests” (qedeshim [the masculine form of “qedsha”] in the Torah regularly engaged in homosexual acts “in a dog position” [not with dogs]; see: http://www.dogluvers.com/dog_breeds/Religious_prostitution) who accepted it to have a closer communion with the various Elohim (gods/goddesses) that peopled the pantheon of the Old Testament. The ancient Apiru (who later became the Hebrews and destroyed the advanced civilization of the Canaanites so as to raise their agricultural god YHWH to first position in a Hebrew pantheon used for a time this system of religious prostitution, as seen, for example, in Genesis 38:21, where Judah asks Canaanite men of Adulam “Where is the harlot, that was openly by the way side?”. The Hebrew original employs the word “qedsha” in Judah’s question, as opposed to the standard Hebrew “zonah”. The word “qidsha” is derived from the root Q.D.Sh, which signifies uniqueness and holiness. Qidsha probably represents a religious prostitute–which in Canaan and especially in the emerging Hebrew community meant male prostitutes (not homosexuals) was a term uncommon among the Israelites, but known to them from the neighboring people and used in communication between them.

Historically, YHWH wed Asherah, the goddess of Canaan in order to get to be the First of the Gods (not the only deity) as seen on numerous artifacts and potsherds (see: Arthur Frederick Ide (1991), Yahweh’s Wife. Dallas: Monument Press) as temple prostitution was common in the early centuries when the “religion of Abraham” developed from its Hindu source into a Middle Eastern cult.

Yahweh and his wife Asherah and the Gold Calf from Exodus

The Golden Calf was actually called YHWH. The god of Moses was known as Adonai or Tetragrammaton (from the Greek τετραγράμματον, meaning

Tetragrammaton in Paleo-Hebrew, Aramaic, and Hebrew scripts

“[a word] having four letters” which later generations adopted for YHWH, but in the earliest scrolls of Exodus we find אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה (Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh), and there were many Yah gods throughout the lands of Egypt, Canaan, and Assyria. Yah is associated in all of these cultures and their theologies as the moon god in Egyptian religion, heifer/cow gods of Jeroboan in Samaria, and with the goat god elsewhere. The real god of Israel was not Yah nor Yahweh, but translated most basically as “I am what I am” (or “I will be that which I now am”). He was the male friend of the senior god Baal and both were worshipped with sexual rituals (heterosexual and homosexual), as was Asherah for in the ancient past sex was known as normal and an action to be enjoyed.

Prostitution (by both genders) was common throughout Israel during its early days. Up to the time of King Josiah’s reform (621 BC) there was a women’s cult of Asherah(under qedeshim auspices [consecrated for fertility practices], according to 2 Kings 23:7) in the Jerusalem Temple, alongside the male cult of Yahweh. There is no records of any one being obsessed by it, nor of any court ruling against it. This is a modern invention–coming with the Emperor Constantine establishing the Christian church in the fourth century at his Council of Niceae, but even then sexuality remained a part of religion until later emperors ruled against Saturnalia and its cult that played a significant role in the early Christian communities. After Saturnalia was illegalized, obsession with sex and human sexuality grew rapidly, especially among the clergy who burned people to see their clothes fall off, and who sported with instruments of torture to remove sexual organs–so similar to Pope Pius IX who hammered off the genitalia of ancient statues that lined the hallways of the Vatican.

In most cases obsession with or about something is a subconscious worry or concern for that which is desired or that which is condemned from being a desire because of an external force that has neither logic nor reality (religion). In terms of whether the thinker is actively resisting the obsessive thoughts, this is likely to happen at some point, when the thinker recognizes that he or she does not want to continue the obsession, but feels compelled to do so, for one reason or another (usually related to anxiety or distress in some way) as is common with fundamentalist thinkers who see only black and white (cf. Hollander, Eric; Dan J. Stein (1997). Obsessive-compulsive Disorders. Informa Health Care. p. 212).

At first, it is possible that the thinker does not “actively resist” obsessing over something or some one, but later attempts to resist that obsession for fear that it is a part of his or her own psychology and lifestyle. Vander Plaats projects the classic obsession psychosis: an addiction, directly analogous to alcohol and drug addictions which he maintains to satisfy his own feelings of negativity or being rejected by or unable to obtain the very object, source, or thing he declares to oppose.

Obsession with and over the issue of gay marriages occurs when people cannot help themselves from thinking a particular thought: usually that of the sexuality that occurs in the situation (in this case: gay sex within the bounds of matrimony that was first used to register the joining of two people over 11,000 years ago). Sex addicts and those who are opposed to sexuality either all forms of sex or a particular form of sex for any length of time, spend whole days consumed by sexual thoughts of how to enhance the sexual act or stop the sexual act and those involved in it. They develop elaborate fantasies, speak publicly and privately about it or against it, find new ways of obtaining or denying sex and mentally revisiting past experiences which may have included the very act they are against and seek to either illegalize, marginalize or end by means of violence. Because their minds are so preoccupied by these thoughts, other areas of their lives that they could be thinking about are neglected. To this end, Vander Plaats of Iowa, has lost all thought of all programs save the removal of the Iowa Supreme Court (all the judges who voted unanimously to allow gay marriage in Iowa) and even district judges who do not come out against gay marriage. Based on psychological studies, Vander Plaats is a classic case of a man who either had or was denied having a gay relationship of any duration (consider: Ulman, Richard B.; Harry Paul (2006). The Self Psychology of Addiction and Its Treatment. Psychology Press).

Bob Vander Plaats in Iowa

The obsession that Vander Plaats has with homosexuality and gay marriages speaks volumes about his own attempt to hide his subconscious mind from his conscious reality.

“Obsessions” according to the DSM-IV-TR (American Psychiatric Association. (2000).Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (fourth edition, text revision). Washington, DC), which is the most commonly used psychiatric diagnostic system in the US has this comment: “Obsessions are persistent ideas, thoughts, impulses, or images that are experienced as intrusive and inappropriate and that cause marked anxiety or distress…the content of the obsession is alien, not within his or her own control, and not the kind of thought that he or she would expect to have” (p. 457).

Vander Plaats has never taken time to study this text or the others he throws around to condemn a group of people he lives in terror of being near or seeing: homosexuals in a happy gay marriage.